It's the classic leader's lament. Driving organizational performance in a way that delivers on business outcomes while engaging employees. A year after presenting this at TAC 2018 it is more relevant than ever.

Organizations have been deploying Scrum, SAFe, DAD, and a host of other practices in the hope of achieving better business outcomes. We all know that practices alone don't generate the kind of powerful results you need to succeed. The missing ingredient? We hear the word culture a lot. But it is really about operating norms, or habits and behaviors. What I've observed through dozens of transformations within my company and clients are 5 habits that the leading organizations all possess. When these 5 habits are ingrained, the practices fall into place, and performance starts to rocket.

In this session you'll learn the habits, and why they drive performance. You' also learn about the key questions you can start asking to encourage the habits to take hold in your team, or more broadly, in your organization. The path to performance is paved by changes in behaviors that are reinforced daily. Asking the right questions at the right time can be a powerful way to nudge behaviors in the right direction.

Having said that, it's not enough to create the conditions for new habits to form. Countless studies, including famous ones by Wolfram Schultz, neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, have shown that a cue and reward on their own aren't enough to create a lasting habit. Only when your brain starts to anticipate a reward will the habit become automatic.

Traditional testing approaches can’t predict all failure modes and hence Chaos Engineering is a discipline to simulate these failures and build better applications. It’s a way to fire controlled disruptions into a distributed system and then analyzing the behavior, identifying the weak areas & improving resiliency with automation. To add chaos using DevOps and build anti fragile apps is the need.

The traditional approach to organizational design is a barrier if you want to grow an organization where smart people make amazing decisions that delight customers and enrich their careers.

This session aims to provides leaders at all levels of the organization with an introduction to a set of design tools that can help them create organizational structures that promote agility rather than interfere with it.

Using a game I call Full Stack Poker, I’ll facilitate a highly interactive dialogue where attendees will play the role of various organizational stake holders tasked with getting the right skills into teams responsible for delivering value.

Loosely based on the planning poker game, attendees will collaboratively select from a number of Team Engagement Patterns, collectively agreeing on an engagement model that lays out how teams can engage with support functions and other teams. Participants will also be able to estimate the amount of organizational complexity their teams will incur based on the Team Engagement Patterns chosen.

The session is aimed at teaching attendees basic concepts behind defining agile organizational structure through a highly engaging / hands on session.

Businesses in every industry are embracing innovation as an imperative to accelerate market responsiveness and deliver high quality products faster. With the velocity of business being faster than ever before, Internal Audit is evolving to be able to assure, advice and anticipate risk most effectively. In this session, we will discuss how Agile practices and principles can be applied in the realm of Internal Audit to deliver value efficiently by providing meaningful and timely insights, thereby improving the impact and influence of the Internal Audit function within the organization.

Challenge: how can we transform the economy of Alberta as an organization of just over 5,500 team members and 770,000 customers?

Join Todd Hirsch, Vice President and Chief Economist of ATB Financial as we explore the ATB Story and how we believe 94 words are about more than Agile transformation. We believe we can and are changing the traditional assumption that Alberta’s economy is all about oil and gas.

A rant, with evidence, on why electronic tools in general, and JIRA in particular, are anti-Agile. Participants will use the Agile Manifesto to evaluate the electronic tools they are currently familiar with. JIRA is used as a case study.

NOTE: Scrum asks us to have courage. The Agile Manifesto asks us to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I hope the organizing committee will consider this proposal despite the risk that it might offend some tool vendors. If we can't speak freely about our experiences with tools, we will fail as a community.

In early 2019, I had the honour to work with three highly-talented and passionate agile coaches (Shingi Kanhukamwe, Erick Martinez, and Farshad Gheshlaghi), together we supported a group of 300 people within a large financial institution. More recently, together we four agile coaches have co-created a simple and powerful model to coach, support, mentor, and enable teams. It is called the Faceted Coaching Model.

This workshop will be co-facilitated by Paul Heidema and Shingi Kanhukamwe.

Origin of the Model and Its Initial Creation

Shingi was looking for a way to speak to teams in a simple and jargon-free way without sacrificing insight or key areas of focus. Over the past few years, Erick, Farshad and I have also been seeking simple ways to do the same thing as Shingi. Each of us have been in the field of agile coaching for several years and used many approaches to support teams in becoming more effective, collaborative, and healthy.

Continuing the story, Shingi connected the way that jewelers look at precious stones and gems to how we could work with teams. This process led to the naming and focus of the model.

A jeweler uses a special tool called a loupe. It "...is a simple, small magnification device used to see small details more closely." - Wikipedia

With this loupe, the jeweler can see what a stone can become. By cutting into the gem (called faceting), the jeweler is able to see more of its potential through the light, shine, and clarity.

By using the analogy of a loupe, we four co-created a model that uses facets (showcases many aspects of a group or team) to be able to see where the group that we are supporting is and potentially where it could become.

Key Principles about the Model

1. The model is agnostic. This means that it does not dictate which framework, method, or set of practices that need to be followed. This allows for a variety of thinking, plenty of experimentation, and any team could use this model.
2. The model is pull-based. The work that we do with the teams is based on their desire/needs (not ours) on what they would like to advance and focus on. This allows for greater ownership and a partnership between coach and team to improve.
3. The model is non-linear. Since teams are every changing with its own people and the work to be done, this model allows for each team to advance and regress in multiple ways. This is more closely connected to the reality of life and work.

Some Closing Thoughts About the Model

As I have been using this model for the past few months with multiple teams (and has my co-creators as well), I have learned that this model is still in development. We started with 5 facets, then grew it to 7 facets, and now to 8 facets.

We are in a world where advances in technology result in rapid disruption of every industry, and healthcare is no exception. Implementation of electronic medical records and advanced hospital information systems (HIS) provides a means to reduce deaths associated with medical errors and allows for advanced analytics to improve the standard of care. However, the logistical burden of the scale of the transformation poses a significant challenge to public sector organizations.

This session will act as a case study from a recent engagement completed by our team, which was the largest HIS implementation in Canada to date. We will discuss some of the challenges encountered throughout the two year implementation, how a focus on agile values provided an avenue to overcome the challenges, and some of the lessons learned from the application of agile principles in a non-traditionally agile industry.

Attendees can expect to leave the presentation with 1) an idea of the cutting edge changes occurring in the health tech industry, as well as 2) tips in bringing the strengths of Agile such as resiliency, flexibility and transparency into your own organization.

Description:

As ATB continues its Digital transformation, the skills we need to achieve our goals become harder and harder to find. Instead of searching further and further away for scarcer and scarcer skills how can we build the skills and culture that we need internally?

The Digital Strategy team at ATB focuses heavily on this question and our first major initiative related to this was hosting an internal Hackday that created an immersive learning experience for team members while contributing towards our engineering culture. Learn from our experience planning a Hackday from scratch and discover how impactful immersive learning can be.

“The Agile mindset isn't just gained with learning, but unlearning years of current practice”

Everyone wants to do agile but how often do they get it right? The real learning curve is how to ensure the approach sticks through behaviour and mindset shift in the organization and leadership.

We commonly see organizations limit themselves to agile by focusing on software delivery through techniques such as Scrum or Kanban; failing to recognize the importance of the rest of the organization must fundamentally shift their culture. But how can an individual help their organization through this journey?

In this session, we will show how agile is not something you do, but it’s what you embody through 5 key shifts. You will learn how to successfully implement agile while remaining relevant, responsive, and successful in today’s rapidly evolving business world.

While retrospectives are amazing, imagine if you could make continuous improvement happen every single day. Imagine being able to drive meaningful improvements in your organization that not only improve performance, but also transforms your culture.

In this workshop, you'll learn techniques for running continuous improvement micro-experiments. These are short, fast test and learn loops that give you feedback in hours or days. You can use these techniques for personal improvement, and you can use them at the team and organizational level. These techniques are universally applicable. We've been using them with executives at Fortune 100 companies as well as teams and individuals at every level in those organizations. We've also been using them also with public sector organizations with the same positive impact.

As performance expectations in organizations rise, people need better ways to get things done. This is my preferred way of achieving that. It works for me and I hope it will work for you.

This is not your average retrospective. It's akin to compound interest. A little improvement every day that at first feels invisible, but over weeks and months, the improvements you implement begin to multiply into visible, tangible outcomes that help you propel yourself and your team into a state of high performance.